Editing frontend without recompiling?

HI, I want to try to change the template of the frontend dashboard. Is is possible to do without recompiling? I dig for the html file but I found only skeleton and not the actual js or html files.
I am on linux server.
I found the templates, but there are not any html file to edit. Someone can provide me a walkthrought to edit and test the frontend? I want to change the whole dashboard with something like this


Thanks